Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce (25 February 1866-20 November 1952) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and politician.

Biography
Benedetto Croce was born in Abruzzi, Italy on 25 February 1866, and he studied law in Rome. He soon became interested in philosophy, publishing his first essay in 1893; he re-established the separation between art and science and categorized the study of history as an art. As he elaborated in his Teoria e storia della storiografia ("The Theory and History of Historiography", 1917), the writing of history was a function of intuition, imagination, and thought, and hence principally related to the discipline of philosophy. He became the leading exponent of Italian new idealism against the positivism predominant in the late nineteenth century. From 1903 to 1946, he was a prominent literary figure as editor of the review La critica. Croce served as Minister of Public Instruction in Giovanni Giolitti's last government (1920-1921), and he became the most prominent apologist for the Giolittian era as a historian. He first regarded Benito Mussolini with tolerant detachment, but openly opposed fascism from 1925. In 1943, he refounded the Italian Liberal Party, which failed, however, to transform itself into a major political force in the following years.